Page:Makers of British botany.djvu/331

He discusses the fungus which produces it, and shows that the tips of the hyphae secrete a cellulose-dissolving ferment which enables them to pierce the cell-walls of the host. This ferment has since been described as cytase. He shows that its production would determine the passage from a merely saprophytic to a parasitic habit, and makes the suggestion that an organism might be educated to pass from one to the other.

An admirable research (1887) was on the formation of the yellow dye obtained from "Persian berries" (Rhamnus infectorius). A dyer had found that uninjured berries afforded a poorer colouring liquor than crushed. Gellatly had found, in 1851, that they contained a glucoside, xanthorhamnin, which sulphuric acid broke up into rhamnetin and grape-sugar. The problem was to localise the ferment which did the work. Ward obtained the unexpected result that it was confined to the raphe of the seed.

As early as 1883 Ward had attacked a problem which he pursued at intervals for some years, and which was fraught with consequences wholly unforeseen at the time. It had long been known that leguminous plants almost invariably carried tubercular swellings on their roots. The opinion had gradually gained ground that they were due to the action of a parasite. Bacteria-like corpuscles had been found in the cells of the tubercle, and it was assumed that they had played some part in exciting the growth of the latter. "No one had as yet succeeded in infecting the roots and in producing the tubercles artificially." Ward described, in a paper in the Phil. Trans. in 1887, how he had accomplished this. He showed, in fact, that a definite organism invades the roots from the soil, and finds its access by the root-hairs.

Lawes and Gilbert had long ago proved that the higher plants are incapable of assimilating free nitrogen. Hellriegel and Wilfarth had, however, shown in 1886 that leguminous plants carry away more nitrogen from the soil than could be accounted for. This Ward confirmed by his own pot-experiments, and satisfied himself that the excess could only be derived from the free nitrogen of the air. Hellriegel further concluded that the tubercles played an essential part in the process. Ward